Arrival and Departure Aircraft Scheduling with Turbulence Interaction Concept

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of optimal aircraft takeoff and landing sequencing at congested airports. The objective is to minimize the makespan for all the aircraft to land at or depart from the airport. This paper presents a novel approach to deal with aircraft separation constraints. The separation time is considered as the combination of the turbulence generated by the preceding aircraft and the ability of the succeeding aircraft to resist turbulence. With this novel concept, the separation constraints are more flexible with aircraft types and are linear with the decision variables. When the sequencing matrix is used as the decision variable, the required number of separation constraints grows linearly with the number of aircraft instead of the quadratic growth with existing formulations. The current formulation also considers the problem of minimizing the deviation from scheduled arriving and departing times. The result provides the speed advisories for each aircraft to air traffic controllers. With the current optimization process, the final result can meet both optimal sequence and minimal time variation requirements. Finally, several simulation results are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.